 It's time to learn practical lessons from the trenches by learning how Hewlett Parker Enterprise address strategy and execution. And to present I want to invite Vishal Law, Chief Strategy Officer of HPE. Vishal works closely to the board CEO and Executive Committee on strategic topics across the company. His main focus is on the company portfolio, merge and acquisitions, partnership and go-to-market strategies. Please join me in welcoming Vishal Law. Good morning everybody. I'm excited to be here. I hope you are as well. And I'm excited because I'm passionate about this topic. I have been in the strategy world about 15 maybe about 20 years. And I see that gap that Brightline and PMI, the organizations are trying to fill, which is a real gap. And I'm excited to be here because, you know, we're going to be talking about specifically how do you bridge execution and strategy, which is a passion of mine. And I'll get into more details around how I look at strategy execution, what are the root causes, at least from my experience that I have seen in terms of why strategy doesn't stick, why slides don't become reality. And then from there we'll talk a bit more about what are some of the areas where we could, as practitioners, work to improve that connectivity between strategy and execution. And then finally I'll give you a little bit of flavor from the work that we do at HPE in terms of how we've done, how we have bridged strategy and execution to be a continuum to make significant impact to our customers, to our employees, as well as to our shareholders. So those are the next 15 minutes. And I have a lot of material here, so I'm going to speak twice as fast as I typically do to make it all work in the 15 minutes that I have. So let's get going. Quick overview on myself, I think Ricardo did this. I'm going to skip this. But let me start off with this, right? I was a management consultant for close to a decade. So I did a lot of strategy formulation. And then before that I went to business school and I spent a couple of years learning about strategy. So what I would say is that strategy is an established discipline, in my opinion, right? And at the highest level is some mechanism by which we all make choices and trade-offs. But it's something that has grown over time. And if you look at the history of strategy, the way at least I think about it is it started in the early to mid 60s with this book that was published on strategy and structure by Chandler from HBS. And over the past I think, what, 50 years or so now? 55 years? On average, there were 500 books that get published, right, every year. So just think about the amount of work that's happening from people who are really thinking hard about this topic. But as practitioners, you just can't absorb that much material. And from a framework perspective, again, a lot of work has been done over the last many years from the early work in the 80s by Michael Porter to, we heard from Roger about his cascading strategy framework, value chain, growth share matrix. You just kind of name it, right? There's a whole bunch of work that's been done. And again, like I was talking about business school, I mean, if you just look at the top five business, top 10 business schools, they produce about 5,000 graduates every year. A lot of them go into strategy. They all invest half a million dollars in their two years at business school, learning about strategy and kind of practicing it after that, right? Same with academic research, there's been a ton of work that's happened in academia over time. And I know we have some very distinguished folks today in the room who are doing a lot of thinking and a lot of brain power has gone into strategy. And of course they are consultants. We heard about some consultants earlier. If you just look at the top 50 consulting firms, I mean, their revenues are in the $200 billion range, right? Even if 10% of that is strategy, that's $20 billion that people's companies spend on strategy today. Just imagine the amount of work. So the question that I would ask is, why isn't strategy translating to execution? And we all heard about that through the morning today, which is that there is a gap. And I have some data here that we can get started with. So if you look at some data points here, and these are just examples, most studies say that 30 to 50% of strategies are successful. And what does that mean? Which means either they get implemented or they get implemented and don't get the right results, right? And I'll just read a couple of them for you, right? Study by McKinsey says 70% of transformations fall short of desired results. Just imagine 70%. These are stunning numbers, in my opinion. 61% acknowledged that their firms often struggle to bridge the gap between strategy formulation and its day-to-day implementation. And that's from PMI in the economy, right? And then only 10% of organizations surveyed achieve at least two-thirds of the strategy objectives from bridges consultancy. So if you just look at these numbers, these are just amazing numbers, in my opinion. And there was a very comprehensive academic study done on looking at the research that has happened over time just to review study. And then you kind of see some data points there. Again, it seems like some improvement over time, but again, a huge gap. And then the question that you all ask and that I ask is why is that gap, given all the work that has gone into formulation of strategy, why isn't the industry as a corporate America and just corporations over the world, why aren't we good at making that stick and translating this to execution? And as I take a step back from the work that I've done over the years, what I'm doing at HPE today, I feel that there are three basic reasons, right? One is just that the strategy wasn't designed correctly, right? And I'll get into some of these in more detail. The second is around the fact that we just didn't get our teams engaged and aligned around the objectives. And I will talk a bit more about the human side of transformation in the next panel coming up. And then the last one is around enablers. Did we just put the right enablers in place for us to be successful as companies or not, right? And I think if you look at why strategies are not successful, they end up falling in these three buckets. So let me get into them in more detail. So going into the design of strategy, what do I mean by strategy wasn't designed correctly, right? In many, many occasions, what happens is that people think of strategy, but it's not really a true strategy. It's at a high level, hey, I want to be the greatest company, right? Or I want to be the biggest player, or I want to be the leading blah, blah, blah, right? You don't get into the details. Sometimes it's just financial plan. My strategy is to go 10%. Okay, how do you do that, right? Or some Gantt chart or it's like a one-page objective goal statement, right? Those are not enough. That won't get executed, right? Or there's not enough detail on the strategy, right? There's not enough concreteness on the strategy, there's not enough goals associated with it. People haven't broken it down into pieces and say, basically here's my strategy, but here's how it cascades down into the organization in terms of objectives and priorities. And I think the most important one is most people find it very difficult to make choices, right? It was end of the day for most of us. Capital is constrained, right? You just don't have enough capacity from a system perspective, from people perspective, from a cash perspective to go and successfully execute on a whole bunch of things, which means you have to make choices. And in many companies that I have seen, we just don't. It's difficult to make choices. We just don't make the choices, right? And so those are some of the reasons in terms of why I believe strategies aren't designed right, which makes them fail. The second is around alignment. And what I have seen is for strategies to be successful, there has to be alignment from top to bottom. And the entire organization has to execute on the strategy, but it does start at the top, right? It does start as most of you are leaders here and does start with us in terms of making sure it sticks, right? And I just talked about choices. Whenever we make choices, there will be winners and there will be losers, right? And that's when politics come into play, there's more talk than action in organizations, right? So those are the things that hamper the implementation of strategy. And as it gets to the next layer, employees follow the leaders. And if they see the leaders exhibiting a certain behavior in terms of executing or not executing to the strategy, you see the same behavior kind of percolate down into the organization, right? And then the other thing that I've seen that happens is, as you go further down into the organization, unless we are able to communicate correctly and accurately our priorities, there's not enough context in the organization, right? And if people don't understand, the context is difficult for them to execute against it, right? And lastly is in terms of enablers, right? Which is in terms of operating models is in terms of incentives, and some kind of a management system. We had a whole bunch of discussion on PMO earlier, and I can have a long debate on that topic. I think it's important, right? Because you just need focus execution on certain things. And I'll get into some examples. Incentives are a huge element of making sure that the strategies get executed. I talked about resource allocation, but if you don't align incentives, people will not be incentive to go execute on a certain strategy. So I think all of these things need to come together in terms of making sure that we are able to execute on strategy. So these are, in my opinion, some root causes. But let me get into what we could do as practitioners to make strategy stick, right? Or slides get real, as I call it. The first thing is to have a dynamic strategy, right? I mean, strategy isn't done, it's not a static document, a piece of paper. It's something that needs to evolve over time as your competition changes, right? As the market conditions change, as the company executes on things, you kind of learn more. So in my opinion, it's a dynamic concept, right? You have to continue refreshing your strategy all the time in context of your environment. The second is very important to prioritize, make the trade-off. You need to have a manageable set of things that you go execute on. Most organizations can't execute on too many things. Even large, I mean, I work in a company that has 60,000 people. At one point, we were close to half a million people, right? And even in a company that large, you cannot execute on a bunch of priorities. And then the other thing is around timelines and goals. What I've seen is if your goals are a year long, it gets into a budget process, and it gets very tactical. If it gets very long, four or five years, it never gets executed because the world changes so much, right? So it has to be somewhat of a manageable timeline. The third one, in my opinion, the way I look at it is you have to be brutal about resource allocation, right? I mean, think of it this way. You have to, at the end of the day, align resources to where the market weighs differentiation, right? If it doesn't, why do you bother, right? Whether it's low cost or it's some kind of innovation, you have to do that. And think of M&A as a tool to accelerate your strategy, right? You can't build everything yourself. And I think to the conversation that was happening earlier with Alex, right? I mean, it's difficult to organically be successful with a whole bunch of priorities. So use M&A, right? Use every tool that you have in your toolkit. Talent and culture is a very, very important element. From the top down, you have to think about the right job, right time, right people, right? And that changes over time, right? Today, your priorities are something different than what it may be next year or three years down the road. And for that particular point in time, it may be a different set of folks who may be most relevant. So think of dynamic strategy, but also dynamic talent that helps you execute. And then enable the organization to execute as well. The couple others around alignment, right? I spoke about the issue of alignment. So you have to drive alignment. And then the last one is around measuring and adjusting. You have to, on an ongoing basis, measure what you're doing, if it's not working at just. And this is just an ongoing process. So think of this as a continuous process all the way from strategy being dynamic to adjusting your execution as you go along. Maybe take a couple minutes to talk about just a case study, right? In terms of case study as in case study on ourselves as a company. What do you see on the left hand side is just how our investors look at our results, right? So this is our share price over S&P. And you look at it and you say, okay, this is like twice as the shareholder value return has been twice as much as S&P approximately. And there have been huge transitions over time, right? We've split the company into two. We have divested large chunks of businesses. Six years ago, Hewlett Packard was a 125 billion dollar company in revenues. Today, we are about 30 billion, right? So we've broken up the company in different pieces. We have divested pieces. We've made about 15 acquisitions in the last couple of years just to give you a sense of the magnitude of transformation that we have undergone. And then we've done a bunch of changes from a go-to-market perspective, sales perspective, etc. I won't go into that. In terms of what's worked for us, right? First is our strategy, what is evergreen? We evolve it all the time in terms of, you know, there's competitors. There were two of our large competitors went and merged, right? That has implications on how we think about it. Prioritization and goals are pretty tight for us. So we are very clear about what the priorities are. We align the incentives, we drive it across the organization. In terms of allocation and resources, we are very, very specific about making sure that we allocate resources to where there is value. And then M&A is a big tool, like I said. And some of those are on communication that I spoke about earlier. And then the last thing is we've actually put together dedicated structures that are formed dynamically and go away dynamically to drive large transitions, because you just can't do large transitions from the organization perspective, going back to the PMO concept. So those are some examples in terms of what we've done. I know we are out of time here, so I will close out. But thank you again for having me. And if you have questions, we can just do that over lunch or anytime during the day today. But thanks again for having me here.